Sprig

» see sprig.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

sprig sat in the san francisco part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. honestly. it was a fifteen-minute meal-delivery startup with its own kitchen and its own drivers, running out of soma and the mission, and it did not exist outside the bay area. in 2014 i was in ankara on a ttnet line eating öğretmenevi lunch from the office downstairs, not waiting on a refrigerated lockbox at the door.

gagan biyani co-founded sprig in 2013 in san francisco with nate keller, the former google executive chef, and nick ramirez. the proposition was a small menu of three or four entrees per day, cooked in a central commissary kitchen, delivered to your home or office in under twenty minutes for around ten to fifteen dollars a meal. the orders came through an iphone app, the receipts said sprig inc., the cars were leased and the drivers were on payroll.

in those days. the company raised in stages. a small series a in late 2013 around two million was followed by a ten million round in 2014. the forty-five million series c in april 2015 was led by social capital. by 2016 the burn rate was running around eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars a month against revenue that was not keeping pace. by early 2017 the board had instructed the team to find a buyer for the kitchen and the route book.

on 26 may 2017 ceo gagan biyani sent the shutdown email and refunded credits. about two hundred people lost their jobs, most of them the part-time drivers and kitchen staff who had built the operation around their schedules. bloomberg confirmed the same morning the buyer search had failed.

~ the record ~

~ the kitchen model ~

sprig's pitch was control over the whole stack. own the kitchen and the menu and the drivers, hit a fifteen-minute delivery window on every order. the comparison at the time was grubhub and seamless, which marketed restaurants and took a transaction cut without touching the food, and uber eats, which used independent contractor drivers and pulled from restaurant menus already there.

the sprig model was harder. it required a working kitchen with chefs on payroll, plus an inventory pipeline that did not waste ingredients, plus a route algorithm that kept drivers busy enough to break even on the per-hour cost. all three pieces had to clear at the same time on the same day, and they almost never did. on a high-demand thursday lunch the operation looked beautiful. on a slow tuesday dinner the same operation lost serious money.

~ the day it died ~

this is mostly told from the bloomberg piece and the techcrunch piece. the buyer search ran through march and april 2017. the company talked to several food-delivery peers and a couple of grocery chains. nothing closed. on the night of 25 may biyani wrote the customer letter, the staff letter went out the next morning, and the app stopped accepting orders by noon. the commissary kitchen on alabama street was emptied and the leased fleet returned within the following week. sprig the brand never came back. nate keller, the chef cofounder, opened a smaller chef-driven catering operation a few years later (or whatever it was called). gagan biyani went on to cofound maven, the online-cohort education startup, in 2020.

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